What do you think?
Shattered Selves: Multiple Personality in a Postmodern World
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review
August 4, 2026
Glass has a strong conviction — that a state of 'multiplicity' [to be without centre, to be infinite facets, to be ahistorical] should not be desired — and will not stop repeating himself thus. I truly believe this book could have been half its length. Maybe given less space to repeat himself, he would have also had less opportunity to be so ideologically confused.
I appreciated this book for how Glass (rightfully) draws attention to the nihilism and pessimism of many postmodernist writers, how they cease thought before providing solution, and may inadvertently enable continued oppressions (including that of the mentally ill). It then struck me how he proceeded to state that to be schizophrenic and [clinically] multiple (i.e. a woman with multiple personality or DID) is to be a "produc[t] of a social and psychological violence that rips apart being, terrorizes the self, and brutalizes the body", to be one "whose beings literally lack coherence or meaning". He describes "millions" of [clinical] multiples as "debilitated and useless" and dedicates ample pages to the hopeless, tortured, inhumanity of being multiple or schizophrenic (two experiences he mentions in tandem for their shared characteristics in fragmentation: to "have lost any will or meaning, [and to] live in the midst of a free-floating nothingness" and be, "as lived existence, a source of extraordinary torment and pain"). For the amount this book details rape and suffering as its central argument, there is a serious "absence of empathy for the person" that he would himself criticise in others, that would even allow for the suggestion that these women or people may not solely be defined by how they have been, and continue to be, abused and left to suffer.
I appreciated this book for how Glass (rightfully) condemned the rhetorical use of 'schizophrenia' in the works of Deleuze and Guattari, for how they reduce the lived experience of a suffering peoples to an abstracted aesthetic and props them up as radical political statement in no will of their own. It then struck me when he proceeded to state that the 'multiple' "creates a world out of nothingness", "[tells a story that] is a narrative commenting on the terror of being", and that within the accounts of [clinical] multiples he found "metaphors or signs commenting on broader political, social, and cultural issues". You cannot have it both ways.
I was rather horrified by his chapter (on said 'issues' embodied by the multiple) that would assert, at length, in Freudian babble, how "the phallocrat who [...] who desires [and rapes] his daughter and therefore removes from her any value in relation to the rest of the culture, has no interest in the civil world [and] defines himself as a criminal presence". I am sure it is lovely to believe that "The Law of the Father does not protect or condone the kind of depravity which creates multiple personality disorder"; I am sure it is lovely to believe that every rapist knows they have done wrong, and that there are not infinite social forces that would enable and seek to justify the abuse of women and children. In this way, the book's emphasis on the undeniably evil — it mentions also, the "cults" that cause a "significant number" of multiple personality cases — starts to make a lot of sense. The abuser is 'elsewhere'; the abuser is 'not like us'. And because 'we' have nothing to do with these women's suffering — past or present (critique of the psychiatric institutions these women lived within is fleeting-to-nonexistent) — we may comfortably sit back and watch them in solemn dismay.
Imagine my surprise when he would, later, speak of how "scapegoating also serves to blind the community to its own culpability, its own failure to take responsibility for creating out of its own fabric a category of otherness which denies, and sometimes defiles, critical forms of human agency". I don't understand if he 'gets it', or not.
And, with regards to Glass' central conviction. Albeit with some resistance, as I read the book, I tried to accept his world where the rhetorical idea of multiplicity conveyed in the texts he critiqued, was in fact offensive to those with [clinical] multiplicity. Sure, [clinical] multiplicity is nothing but suffering, and their lives *are* the physical embodiment of these rhetorical texts (I do not truly believe either of these statements). I suspended my disdain, and tried to appreciate what he was saying that was built on that conviction. Sure, *assuming* that to have developed into a person that lives with multiple dissociated facets to yourself is to be centreless, unable to engage with the world around you, with no sense of self ... eeh ...? ...
Glass admits halfway through the book that there is absolutely a way to live with multiple [perhaps less severely] dissociated facets to yourself in a way that is positive.
"In therapy, it is essential that the alters be brought into what might be called an intrapsychic community, with likeness and disagreements that may contribute toward the creation of a cohesive self and a coherent field. This consciousness need not be monolithic; it may be a unity representing a plurality of interests within the self, interests understood as emotions and moods. This plurality, then, may coexist not as discrete, disconnected parts but as a community of conflicting moods that possess a recognizable coherence, an identity. (That kind of plurality, however, is a much different phenomenon than the discrete alters of the multiple personality.)"
Is it really? Or are you just picking and choosing definitions how they suit you? This *was* a multiple personality. At what point in each personality agreeing to operate in cohesion did it stop being so, in your opinion? It is, of course, very easy to argue that [clinical] multiplicity is suffering, if everything that is not suffering, is no longer [clinical] multiplicity in your eyes. This lauded inner "community" is no different to the self as a "fabulous opera [...] one, diverse, capable of being all those it will at one time be, a group acting together, a collection of singular beings that produce the enunciation" that you contradicted several dozen pages before.
Three stars because at the very least, I found his final chapter on rethinking psychiatric 'asylum' as a necessary place of safety for the "psychically displaced" thought-provoking, albeit idealistic. I just wish it didn't feature justifications upon non-consensual restraint on schizophrenics 'for their own good'.
I appreciated this book for how Glass (rightfully) draws attention to the nihilism and pessimism of many postmodernist writers, how they cease thought before providing solution, and may inadvertently enable continued oppressions (including that of the mentally ill). It then struck me how he proceeded to state that to be schizophrenic and [clinically] multiple (i.e. a woman with multiple personality or DID) is to be a "produc[t] of a social and psychological violence that rips apart being, terrorizes the self, and brutalizes the body", to be one "whose beings literally lack coherence or meaning". He describes "millions" of [clinical] multiples as "debilitated and useless" and dedicates ample pages to the hopeless, tortured, inhumanity of being multiple or schizophrenic (two experiences he mentions in tandem for their shared characteristics in fragmentation: to "have lost any will or meaning, [and to] live in the midst of a free-floating nothingness" and be, "as lived existence, a source of extraordinary torment and pain"). For the amount this book details rape and suffering as its central argument, there is a serious "absence of empathy for the person" that he would himself criticise in others, that would even allow for the suggestion that these women or people may not solely be defined by how they have been, and continue to be, abused and left to suffer.
I appreciated this book for how Glass (rightfully) condemned the rhetorical use of 'schizophrenia' in the works of Deleuze and Guattari, for how they reduce the lived experience of a suffering peoples to an abstracted aesthetic and props them up as radical political statement in no will of their own. It then struck me when he proceeded to state that the 'multiple' "creates a world out of nothingness", "[tells a story that] is a narrative commenting on the terror of being", and that within the accounts of [clinical] multiples he found "metaphors or signs commenting on broader political, social, and cultural issues". You cannot have it both ways.
I was rather horrified by his chapter (on said 'issues' embodied by the multiple) that would assert, at length, in Freudian babble, how "the phallocrat who [...] who desires [and rapes] his daughter and therefore removes from her any value in relation to the rest of the culture, has no interest in the civil world [and] defines himself as a criminal presence". I am sure it is lovely to believe that "The Law of the Father does not protect or condone the kind of depravity which creates multiple personality disorder"; I am sure it is lovely to believe that every rapist knows they have done wrong, and that there are not infinite social forces that would enable and seek to justify the abuse of women and children. In this way, the book's emphasis on the undeniably evil — it mentions also, the "cults" that cause a "significant number" of multiple personality cases — starts to make a lot of sense. The abuser is 'elsewhere'; the abuser is 'not like us'. And because 'we' have nothing to do with these women's suffering — past or present (critique of the psychiatric institutions these women lived within is fleeting-to-nonexistent) — we may comfortably sit back and watch them in solemn dismay.
Imagine my surprise when he would, later, speak of how "scapegoating also serves to blind the community to its own culpability, its own failure to take responsibility for creating out of its own fabric a category of otherness which denies, and sometimes defiles, critical forms of human agency". I don't understand if he 'gets it', or not.
And, with regards to Glass' central conviction. Albeit with some resistance, as I read the book, I tried to accept his world where the rhetorical idea of multiplicity conveyed in the texts he critiqued, was in fact offensive to those with [clinical] multiplicity. Sure, [clinical] multiplicity is nothing but suffering, and their lives *are* the physical embodiment of these rhetorical texts (I do not truly believe either of these statements). I suspended my disdain, and tried to appreciate what he was saying that was built on that conviction. Sure, *assuming* that to have developed into a person that lives with multiple dissociated facets to yourself is to be centreless, unable to engage with the world around you, with no sense of self ... eeh ...? ...
Glass admits halfway through the book that there is absolutely a way to live with multiple [perhaps less severely] dissociated facets to yourself in a way that is positive.
"In therapy, it is essential that the alters be brought into what might be called an intrapsychic community, with likeness and disagreements that may contribute toward the creation of a cohesive self and a coherent field. This consciousness need not be monolithic; it may be a unity representing a plurality of interests within the self, interests understood as emotions and moods. This plurality, then, may coexist not as discrete, disconnected parts but as a community of conflicting moods that possess a recognizable coherence, an identity. (That kind of plurality, however, is a much different phenomenon than the discrete alters of the multiple personality.)"
Is it really? Or are you just picking and choosing definitions how they suit you? This *was* a multiple personality. At what point in each personality agreeing to operate in cohesion did it stop being so, in your opinion? It is, of course, very easy to argue that [clinical] multiplicity is suffering, if everything that is not suffering, is no longer [clinical] multiplicity in your eyes. This lauded inner "community" is no different to the self as a "fabulous opera [...] one, diverse, capable of being all those it will at one time be, a group acting together, a collection of singular beings that produce the enunciation" that you contradicted several dozen pages before.
Three stars because at the very least, I found his final chapter on rethinking psychiatric 'asylum' as a necessary place of safety for the "psychically displaced" thought-provoking, albeit idealistic. I just wish it didn't feature justifications upon non-consensual restraint on schizophrenics 'for their own good'.
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review